pages tabs

7pm Tues. 6-21-16 Movie Night with the Revolution Club: "The Codes of Gender"

Watch the film The Codes of Gender and hang out for a discussion after--we need a culture of revolt against this revolting culture!*

Written and directed by Sut Jhally, The Codes of Gender shows how one of American popular culture's most influential forms communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity. The film presents an analysis of the role commercial advertising plays in influencing ideas and values about masculinity and femininity, including the incessant portrayals of women as powerless, submissive and dependent on men, while men are portrayed as active, strong and in control.

In striking visual detail, The Codes of Gender looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of objectification and beauty, to provide a clear-eyed view of the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations.
(Revolution Books would like to thank the Media Education Foundation for making the film available for showing.)

*Let's imagine if we had a whole different art and culture. Come on, enough of this "bitches and ho's" and SWAT teams kicking down doors. Enough of this "get low" bullshit. And how come it's always the women that have to get low? We already have a situation where the masses of women and the masses of people are pushed down and held down low enough already. It's time for us to get up and get on up.

Imagine if we had a society where there was culture—yes it was lively and full of creativity and energy and yes rhythm and excitement, but at the same time, instead of degrading people, lifted us up. Imagine if it gave us a vision and a reality of what it means to make a whole different society and a whole different kind of world. Imagine if it laid out the problems for people in making this kind of world and challenged them to take up these problems. Imagine if art and culture too—movies, songs, television, everything—challenged people to think critically, to look at things differently, to see things in a different light, but all pointing toward how can we make a better world.

Imagine if the people who created art and culture were not just a handful of people but all of the masses of people, with all their creative energy unleashed, and the time were made for them to do that, and for them to join with people who are more full-time workers and creators in the realm of art and culture to bring forward something new that would challenge people, that would make them think in different ways, that would make them be able to see things critically and from a different angle, and would help them to be uplifted and help them to see their unity with each other and with people throughout the world in putting an end to all the horrors that we're taught are just the natural order of things. Imagine all that.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 2:8